Muret le Vebre- Salvetat-sur-Agout: 22klms, 1st Aug

Another early morning start, the adaptive breakfast of muesli, milk, yoghurt, honey, and fruit, providing the fuel for the morning. Despite the weather forecast for another hot day, the overcast conditions help. I am wearier and the sciatic pain is increasing in the lower of my back and buttocks. This sort of nagging pain, interlaced with sharp, shooting, pain, saps the energy.

We pass beautiful pastures, forests and lakes. There is no one around, and we have `le parc naturel du Haut Languedoc' to ourselves. To be in such nature, alone, is a remarkable thing. We humans are such paradoxical beings: to require such splendid solitude from humanity, to become more human, more of who we really are,i is quite strange. The philosopher might say that the subject needs the object, which shapes him through association. Therefore, if the environment changes, it would follow that the subject changes too. One experiences this fundamental shift/change in such surrounds. The question remains: how one might sustain such `being` back in the daily city environment?

Some basics come to mind in sustaining this annual `pilgrimage', as a daily way of life. After all, it is called `Le Chemin' (The Way), and in other times was used as an experiential learning method-an analogous experience to inform daily life. The daily trials and joys of the trail are like those of our daily lives. For me, the trail reminds that we are common in such things; that sharing a common ground of understanding makes for better days (and nights). This then is the fraternity to which we all belong, but to which we have become estranged in our modern, isolated, and egoistic or fear-driven pursuits.

The rituals that recreate this experience are also simple, basic ones:

• The sharing of home-cooked meals and conversation at night, without the distraction of television
• Waking earlier to tranquillity and healthier, fibre-filled, breakfasts
• Greater physical activity to reduce stress and increase elimination of toxins
  
  

We arrive in Salvetat-sur-Agout to find the famous spring where this renowned, bottled water, comes from. It is strange to find little mention of the fact. At night, I find some left over pasta in the gite and decide to cook it along with some chilli con carné. I invite new found hiker friends, but they are intent on eating at the local café. Not everyone appreciates such simple pleasures, and that's ok, as it has taken me a lifetime to do so. We wash down this feast with a bottle of the local Saint Chinian (cepages: Carignan, Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre)  red wine-all very restorative, when cooked with good intent.